Known in Word & Sacrament

Sometimes I feel a little bit like the minister who stood before a congregation on Easter Sunday and said, “My friends, I have in my possession three colorful eggs.  If you buy the first egg it will cost you $100, but the sermon will only be 10 minutes long.  If you buy the second egg, it will cost you $50, but the sermon will last 25 minutes.  The third egg only costs $20, but comes with a 45-minute sermon.  We are going to take an offering now so I can see which egg you want me to deliver.”  Well, I don’t know if I’ll lay an egg this morning or not, but I can promise you two things: first, you don’t have to pay for it and second, it will be over in about 10 minutes.  During this time I want to describe my personal history with today’s gospel reading.  I encountered it one way growing up in the Presbyterian Church and another here in the Episcopal Church. 

I have said before that I learned my bible in the Presbyterian Church.  Every Sunday we children had a memory verse to learn and recite the next week.  Youth groups, starting in Middle School, focused on the bible, as did the bible study that began an hour before youth group.  Our Senior High youth group, along with another bible study on a weeknight, drilled home in me the content of the bible and much of its meaning.  Add to this that we were encouraged to read the bible on our own, which I did one chapter a night before bed for almost fifteen years.

So you can imagine how in that environment the focus on today’s reading honed in on the verse, “Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, Jesus interpreted for them the things about himself in all of scripture.”   From there the focus skipped forward to the two disciples saying to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he… was opening the scriptures to us?”  For us, the bible was the primary sacrament of the church.  Knowing it was central to knowing God.  The headwork of knowing the bible led to a heart on fire for God.

When I entered college in the fall of 1978 I did so with the intention of majoring in religion and philosophy.  Philosophy morphed into economics, but I stayed with religion.  I had classes in Old and New Testament survey, which were largely content driven and easy for me.  I also took a class in New Testament Greek, which was a significant challenge.  Over the next few semesters I had classes on the life of Paul, Old Testament theology, the Minor Prophets, the Book of Revelation, and on and on.  There was a lot of bible and even in massive doses it fueled my spiritual life.

During this time I drifted away from the mainline Presbyterian Church and tried out a couple of different bible churches before settling in to a small Orthodox Presbyterian Church in my college town.  They hired a new pastor from New Zealand who decided early on to start a preaching series beginning at Genesis 1:1 and making his way from there through the entire bible.  That is an ambitious undertaking both for the preacher and for the congregation.  Worship at the O.P. Church was something straight out Puritan England – an opening hymn, a long pastoral prayer (and let me emphasize the long part), a responsive reading from the psalter, an offering, and a 45-minute sermon.  Now, when I say ‘sermon’, please don’t mistake this experience with the wonderment I weave here Sunday in and Sunday out.  These sermons were straight bible commentary – comparing and contrasting the position of several renowned scholars arguing over the intricacies of some nuanced point. 

By the middle of my senior year, what with classes in the bible six days a week (yes, my college had Saturday classes) and what felt like another whole class on Sunday morning, the warm, burning I had come to associate with reading the bible cooled off dramatically.  Over the previous two years that pastor had preached is all the way to the 9^th chapter of the book of Genesis and I found myself longing not for words about God but for an experience of God.  I returned to the mainline Presbyterian Church in my college town and there became reacquainted with worship as opposed to study.

I returned home to Ohio after graduating in 1982 and that summer was introduced to the Episcopal Church through, of all things, a bible study.  But this is not what grabbed me.  What grabbed me was the worship.  I was moved by the music (the church had an incredible Men & Boys Choir associated with the Royal School of Church Music), the liturgy (which I found made my heart burn within me), and the preaching (which, rather than engaging the bible as an academic exercised, focused more on applying it to daily life and experience). 

I vividly recall the first Morning Prayer service I attended on the 4^th of July weekend.  I remember being dumbstruck as the Officiant offered a Collect for our Armed Forces and a Collect for Peace.  What impressed me so deeply was that he made no attempt to reconcile the two, no effort to articulate to God exactly how opposites should be balanced and tensions resolved.  We simply, humbly, and gracefully offered our prayers to God and then trusted in God to hear them and to guide us.  How refreshing it was not to be exposed to a lengthy survey on scholarly opinions and what a relief it was not to be subjected to the particular point of view of the person praying!  We all came before God, said our prayers, and put ourselves in a position of trust.  I was hooked for life.

The next Sunday was the first time I participated in the Eucharist at an Episcopal Church.  At every other church I had attended, we sat in the pew while communion was passed out to us.  Every other church I had attended, there was no clear reason even to have communion except a couple of times a year (and even then, many resented that the service took longer than usual because of it).  In my mind’s eye, I can still envision walking up the long center aisle of the church, into the chancel, past the singing choir, and kneeling for the first time at an altar rail.  I can still taste the bread and see the large chalice (filled with wine, not juice).  The basic act of coming forward and kneeling, as everyone else in the church did, started a burning in me that I had never felt before.  It began in me what has been a complex and amazing journey of finding Jesus made known in the breaking of the bread.

Initially I experienced the Eucharist as a deeply penitential moment.  In it I recounted all my sins from the previous week, promised to do better in the week to come, and then hit the reset button on the following Sunday feeling all the while like a miserable sinner because I had failed at my reforms.  Over time, my experience of the Eucharist began to change, not because I was any less a sinner, but because I began to find in it God’s deep acceptance of me for who I am.  This phase of the journey began innocently enough when I received communion from a priest who looked me in eye as he gave me the bread, smiled, and said, “Keith, the body of Christ which is given for you.”  In that moment I felt loved by God for who I am, not condemned by God for who I am not.

I do not regret a thing about my upbringing with its emphasis on knowing the bible.  Frankly, I continue to be surprised at how life-long Episcopalians can sit through services week in and week out and still lack a coherent understanding of the bible.  Beginning this summer with our Wednesday evening pot-luck dinners, I am going to start walking us through the bible and its stories beginning (where else) at Genesis 1:1.  My hope is to expose us to the basic content of the bible and to gain a better sense of its historic flow.

My personal testimony is this: word without sacrament lacks something of the mystery of God.  It is too small.  Too confined.  When God wanted humanity to know God, God became a person, not a book.  That person went through life without writing a thing.  And when he wanted to institute a ritual to remember him and his words, he did so at a meal rather than a bible study.  But sacrament without word is not sufficient either.  The basic stories of our tradition along with its teachings and wisdom begin a holy conversation even in our day.  Without the conversation, the experience of God may happen while the voice of God goes unheard.  At its best, our Episcopal tradition gives us both.  I invite you to commit to a regular practice of reading the bible and conversing about it while at the same time engaging in the worship and sacramental life of the church.

An Irrefutable Witness

One of the great differences between middle school and adulthood is that in middle school it is cool to be hurt.  Back in my day, no one ever tore or cut anything, being injured meant having a broken bone.  Girls who normally wouldn’t even look at you vied for the opportunity to sign your cast.  Teachers excused you from class five minutes early under the premise that you needed more time to navigate the halls.  Best of all, because you were deemed unable to carry your own books, you got to choose someone to leave early with you.  You could pick a friend or perhaps someone who was going to the same class, but most guys, if they knew anything about anything, designated the cutest girl in the class to assist them.  During these precious moments you felt as free as Andy Dufresne sipping suds with his buddies after tarring the prison roof. 

But now, as an adult, injuries, aches, pains, and wounds carry very little, if any, benefit.  They are the marks we bear for having the timidity to live this thing we call life.  No one – and I mean NO ONE – gets through life unscathed. 

On the Sunday after Easter the Lectionary always has us explore the Risen Christ’s early appearance to the disciples when Thomas is not present.  When Thomas does show up they tell him what he missed.  He famously replies, “Unless I see the wounds and touch them for myself, I will not believe” – a response that gets him dubbed with the nickname “Doubting Thomas”. 

We might want to ask why the wounds were so important to him.  I mean, he could have required anything as proof – walking on water, calming a raging storm, or restoring sight to the blind.  A straight-forward answer could be that the wounds would authenticate it was in fact Jesus and that he had in fact been put to death.  But something is going on here that is much deeper and more significant than the hunt for basic evidence.  What might that be?  (Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, old Corny a Lapide can shed no light on this question, presumably because he took off the Sunday after Easter).

Consider this: Did you know that Christianity is the only religion that worships a wounded god?  All other religions worship a being who is above pain and suffering.  Our God became incarnate and suffered as we suffer, yet rose victorious and promises that we will rise with too – not only in the next life, but also in this one.  Over the centuries, millions and millions of believers have come to understand that the wounds Jesus endured are symbolizes of the wounds we experience in life.

The wounds on Jesus’ back (inflicted by the whip) have come to stand for broken promises.  It is difficult to get through life without breaking a promise and darn near impossible to get through life without enduring a promise made to you being broken.  I have been on both sides and neither feels good.

The wounds to Jesus’ head (caused by the crown of thorns) have come to stand for broken thoughts – those ways we tear ourselves down or allow the words of others to ruminate in us to our detriment.  It may be the voice of an overly critical parent reminding that you will never amount to anything.  It may be the voice of society saying you should be thinner.  Or it may even be your own voice articulating expectations about life that are completely unrealistic.

The nail wounds in Jesus’ hands and feet have come to represent the brokenness of our bodies.  Some of us experience this as the aches and pains of getting older, while others live with chronic and debilitating conditions.  That nearly 25% of our income is spent of healthcare suggests there is much about our physical bodies that is broken.

The spear wound to Jesus’ side now stands for broken relationships.  Leonardo da Vinci included a fascinating detail in his famous painting of the Last Supper.  Under Judas’ elbow there is a spilled salt cellar because in that day salt was a symbol of friendship of hospitality.  There is not a person here this morning who has not suffered at least one very painful broken relationship in life. 

Jesus’ fifth wound, the piercing wound to his heart, has come to represent broken faith.  Wounds and wrongs have a way of sticking like burrs to the soul.   C.S. Lewis once said that praise is inner health made audible, but for many it is an act that simply is not possible.

That Jesus had been wounded Thomas believed.  That he could be raised given those wounds Thomas questioned.  If you consider the wounds of your life you will certainly understand his position.  Broken things stay broken for a long, long time.

I personally have visited very few of the great cathedrals in Europe, but those who have say that one of the most beautiful stained glass windows is found at the Cathedral in Winchester, England.  It tells no Biblical story nor does it refract the mystery of light, but rather it radiates a kaleidoscope of brilliant colors. 

The Winchester window was not always as it is now.  One day in the 17th century soldier’s of Cromwell’s army used sticks and bars to destroy the ancient windows of Winchester Cathedral along with all the medieval statuary.  Outside the cathedral on that dark day, the lawn was strewn with tiny fragments of glass, irrevocably shattered.  When the soldiers left, the people came out to look at the ruins.  One man stepped forward and began to collect the smashed debris.  Soon the whole community joined him until many bushels were gathered. 

It was evident that a reconstruction of the original work would be impossible.  Still, a cathedral glass worker asked to have the fragments and promised to do the best he could with what had been recovered.  Step by step, inch by inch, high on a scaffold above the cathedral nave, the artisan arranged the little pieces into an intricate abstraction.  Nothing like it had ever been seen before and some shook their heads and grumbled at the novelty of it all. 

When the great window was finally completed, all the assorted little pieces were fit together in an array of jewels.  Those who visit that cathedral today stand in a light radiating through that broken glass which proclaims the essence of the Christian faith more powerfully than any sermon ever could: God can take all the shattered, broken fragments of our lives and create inexpressible beauty.

When Thomas says “I will not believe he is risen until I touch his wounds myself” he is saying he is desperate to know that religion is not a facade masking unhealable pain, that God knows how broken our lives have become and how much we suffer, and that those wounds can be transformed into something strong and beautiful so that their witness is irrefutable. 

The choice of every human being is twofold.  Either we can fall through the cracks of our lives, or we can allow God to shine through them.  Jesus Christ accepts us as we are (broken, limited, sinful and struggling), long before we accept him.  Where we would put ourselves down, Christ bends to lift us up.  Where we would heap judgment and blame upon ourselves, Christ tenderly forgives and accepts us.  Where we are filled with despair or overwhelming sorrow, Christ loves us with a love that recreates us.  You must always remember this: the broken conditions of our humanity elicit Christ’s redemptive touch.

At every service of public worship, in every moment of private prayer, and at every celebration of the Holy Eucharist, in one way or another, the question is asked, “Is your heart breaking?  Then let it break here.  Is your body broken?  Then bring its broken parts here.  Does your mind sometimes break down in a deep anguish you never knew was possible?  Then bring its broken fragments here.”  Then and only then can we say with Julian of Norwich, “All our wounds are seen before God not as wounds but as worships.”

Back in middle school, walking those halls with casts and crutches, it must have been said a hundred times, “The doctor told me that the strongest part of any human bone is the place where a fracture has healed.”  Today we look on our wounded Lord who has been transformed into glory and we look upon the marks of His suffering.  From the witness of the wounds we know that he is like us.  We know that he understands us.  And we know that if we share in his resurrection we can be made whole like he is.  We know all of this because of the witness of the wounds.

 

Nothing Changes in the World until Something Changes in You

The angel said to the women, “Go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed is going ahead of you to Galilee’; there you will see him.’”

Suddenly Jesus met them and said… “Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

If you look at Matthew’s gospel from the perspective of a narrative with force and flow and weight, this Easter story is not at all what you would expect.  As straight literature, the miracle of the Resurrection is superseded by suspense relating to what will happen in Galilee.  If we took Matthew’s telling to heart, today would be a ‘low’ Sunday and we all would gather next week to hear the dramatic conclusion.  What is going on here?

Jesus, of course, was crucified just outside the city of Jerusalem and buried nearby.  His followers were staying close enough that the women were able to walk to the tomb in the predawn hours following the Sabbath Passover.  In Matthew’s telling of the Resurrection, the only time Jesus appears to any of his followers in Jerusalem is the single, brief encounter with the women we heard just moments ago. 

Since all of Jesus’ closest followers where still in Jerusalem, why not meet them there?  Travelling on foot, Galilee is 68 miles to the north, which is a healthy three or four day walk away.  Getting there will require no small effort, but, according to Matthew, that is what the eleven remaining disciples do.  Again we ask why.  Why did Christ want to meet his followers in Galilee?

Well, in this day and age, all you have to do to get an answer to this sort of question is type it into a google search box and – presto – like magic you are pointed toward the insights of one Cornelius a Lapide, a seventeenth century Flemish Jesuit and biblical scholar.  Old Cornelius pondered this very question and, after some quality reflection, put pen dipped in ink to paper and recorded his thoughts:

He goeth before you into Galilee.  First, because Galilee was the native country of the Apostles, to which, after the death of Jesus, they were purposing to return, that they might live more safely among their own relations. 

Secondly, because in Galilee Christ willed to show Himself openly to all His assembled disciples.  For the Jews would not have permitted them to assemble in Judea. 

Thirdly, because in Galilee Christ had for the most part preached, and had performed very many miracles.

Ahhh, if only Cornelius could see your eyes glazing over as I can while I read his thoughts aloud.  Truth does not always have to be dynamic, but there has to be something more significant and a little less practical behind Jesus’ pointed focus to go home.

Think about this: for centuries, when people strive to find God they often do so not by returning home, but by going away.  The pilgrimage – a journey with a holy destination – is a time-honored way to find God.  So too is a retreat – leaving behind the cares of the world for a quiet place where one can commune more closely with the Holy.  Even the weekly practice of going to church emphasizes that when we want to find Jesus we leave home in order to facilitate an encounter.

Home is a place of daily chores and stifling routines.  Meals must be made, floors swept, and clothes cleaned.  At home you have to wake up early in order to go to work all day.  Do this long enough and you will soon find yourself in need of a vacation – a time of solitude and rest and reflection.  If Jesus had sent the disciples to the beach we might have understood, but back home?  It boggles the mind.

I think Corny a Lapide (and he lets friends like me call him that) was on to something when he said the Resurrected Jesus did not want to appear openly in Jerusalem.  Had he done so, it would have been an act with tremendous political and ecclesiastical implications.  Being the seat of power – both for the ruling authority and for the Temple – any open post-resurrection appearance to the masses there would have started a revolt.  Roman officials would have been cast out and Jesus enthroned.  Temple officials would have been swept away and Jesus installed.  And Rome would have responded by crushing the Jesus movement before it ever got started.

By meeting his disciples in Galilee, Jesus is saying that his Kingdom first and foremost is neither political nor institutional.  It is personal.  It begins, if it begins at all, with changed lives and changed hearts and changed minds and changed ways.  The Welsh poet and Anglican priest R.S. Thomas beautifully captures this notion in a poem titled “The Kingdom”:

 

It’s a long way off but inside it

  There are quite different things going on:

Festivals at which the poor man

Is king and the consumptive is

Healed; mirrors in which the blind look

At themselves and love looks at them

Back; and industry is for mending

The bent bones and the minds fractured

By life.  It’s a long way off, but to get

There takes no time and admission

Is free, if you purge yourself

Of desire, and present yourself with

Your need only and the simple offering

Of your faith, green as a leaf.

I like Thomas’ basic message that nothing changes in the world until something changes in you. 

When Jesus meets his followers in Galilee he gives them a charge.  He does not tell them to launch a political campaign nor does he direct them to reform the church.  He tells them this:  “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”  Jesus’ Kingdom is about touching hearts and changing lives.  It is about leading people into the truths that Jesus taught; truths that will enable individuals to live in this world with all the freedom and grace and goodness God intended from the beginning of Creation.

In time, individuals will become communities, and communities will become multitudes, and multitudes will become nations, and nations will become peoples.  In time, structures will need to be redeemed and institutional faith purified.  But the Kingdom begins by baptizing one disciple at a time.  Nothing changes in the world until something changes in you.

I know some clergy who, on this day, will call out the ‘C&E’ crowd – those people who come to church only at Christmas and Easter.  I remember one priest telling them rather pointedly we will have services again next Sunday and 8:00 and 10:30, in case they did not know.  As much as I like to poke fun whenever and wherever possible, I have never warmed to chastising the ‘C&E’ folks in the parish.  Here at St. Paul’s, many of the C&Eers are visiting from out of town.  You have gone to considerable effort to be here this morning and I, for one, thank you.  Your presence adds so much to the celebration of our Easter joy.  There are other folks here today who might mistakenly be labeled as ‘C&E’, but that is not entirely accurate.  Yes, you are here on Christmas and Easter, but also on odd and unpredictable days – a Sunday in July, Shrove Tuesday, two or three weeks in a row in the fall.  You have your reasons and, while curious what they might be, I will not judge them.  I am glad you are here because you too add much to the joy of our celebration.  Easter is the kind of day that brings people to our church for the first time.  You have been thinking about attending a service, but needed the push of a high, holy day to spur you to action.  You too are most welcome here.  And then there are those of you who are here pretty much every Sunday and any other time the doors are open.  I can’t begin to tell you how much I enjoy gathering with you on a regular basis to worship, to laugh, and to care for one another.

Here is the thing we can all take away from today:  No matter how spectacular the Resurrection is (and make no mistake, if true it is the seminal moment in human history), this day is not an end unto itself.  The main point of this day, at least as I can discern from Matthew’s gospel, is not to rejoice that death has been vanquished nor is it to count on a hope of eternal life.  The point of this day is to go to Galilee (whatever and wherever that may be for you), to live now into the teachings of Jesus, and to work now so that others might become disciples (even as you strive to deepen and authenticate your own discipleship).  Nothing changes in the world until something changes in you.

 

"Closer Than All of Them the God Listened"

Fritz Kreisler

I have mentioned before (and will reference again on Easter Sunday) that I have been reading through the works of the Welsh poet and Anglican priest R.S. Thomas.  He is considered by some to be one of the most influential poets of the last century.  I would not describe his work as brimming with sunshine.  His thinking reflects the darkness of an era of world war, Holocaust, genocide, nuclear proliferation, social upheaval, the failure of industry, the triumph of technology, unabashed faith in science, and everything else you might consider to be part and parcel of the 20^th century western world.  You might expect an ordained poet to articulate exactly how God can be found in all of this, but this is precisely where Thomas struggles.  For him, God is most often the God of silence and absence. 

There is perhaps no better articulation of his thinking than a poem titled “In Church.”  In it, Thomas describes his search for God as he sits in the quiet of a church on a Sunday afternoon after everyone has gone home from the services earlier in the day.  In my experience, worship spaces take on a very different feel and personality Sunday afternoon through Saturday night.  They are not at all the same lively, dynamic place we experience them to be on Sunday mornings.  You can feel the quiet and taste the emptiness.  Listen to Thomas’ poem:

Often I try
To analyse the quality
Of its silences.  Is this where God hides
From my searching?  I have stopped to listen,
After the few people have gone,
To the air recomposing itself
For vigil.  It has waited like this
Since the stones grouped themselves about it.
These are the hard ribs
Of a body that our prayers have failed
To animate.  Shadows advance
From their corners to take possession
Of places the light held
For an hour.  The bats resume
Their business.  The uneasiness of the pews
Ceases.  There is no other sound
In the darkness but the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.

Many people, it seems to me, experience God as being rather, well chatty – always talking, always teaching, always close at hand to lend aid, cheer, and sappy inspiration.  That God might be anything but never seems to enter their mind.  Yet this was Thomas’ experience.  Often is it mine.  And I suspect it may be yours as well. 

Earlier this week I was reading through the bible’s story of Abraham.  According to the text, the Lord spoke to him when he was eighty-four years old, promising that he and Sarah would have a son.  The Lord appeared to Abraham again when he was ninety-nine and reissued the promise.  Laying aside the question of procreation at such an old age, think about what the story suggests – that Abraham went fifteen years in between hearing from God.  That is a long silence.  That is a lengthy, and for some I suspect, an alarming absence.

Even though we fill this moment with the words of scripture and liturgy and preaching, more than any other time of the year this hour in this space feels like a time of profound silence.  You will not encounter a chit-chatty God here.  The Passion reading lays out a pervasive silence that no words can change.  Like the disciples at the foot of the Cross, we simply watch and wait.  Regardless of the words we recite and say, no words really are necessary.  No words we utter can mask the fact that God says nothing in the story we just heard.  I for one am fine with this.  In fact, God’s silence is what draws me to this day. 

R.S. Thomas found a way to be comfortable with it by coming to understand that silence and absence are not at all the same thing.  He articulated this through a poem titled “The Musician” which is especially poignant today.  The poem begins with Thomas attending a performance by the master violinist Fritz Kreisler and then moves to the Cross:

A memory of Kreisler once:
At some recital in this same city,
The seats all taken, I found myself pushed
On to the stage with a few others,
So near that I could see the toil
Of his face muscles, a pulse like a moth
Fluttering under the fine skin,
And the indelible veins of his smooth brow.

I could see, too, the twitching of the fingers,
Caught temporarily in art’s neurosis,
As we sat there or warmly applauded
This player who so beautifully suffered
For each of us upon his instrument.

So it must have been on Calvary
In the fiercer light of the thorns’ halo:
The men standing by and that one figure,
The hands bleeding, the mind bruised but calm,
Making such music as lives still.
And no one daring to interrupt
Because it was himself that he played
And closer than all of them the God listened.

God as listener.  God as focused observer.  God as mesmerized by the beautiful music one makes of one’s life.  God as attentive to the sorrowful sound of every plaintive cry.  God as one who does not say something snappy or syrupy or sentimental and cheap.  God as one who will not offer a technical explanation of atonement theory or some other theology so as to sweep up the moment as part of some grand scheme we need to embrace in an act of what some mistakenly call ‘faith’. 

“Closer than all of them the God listened.” 

Every performer knows the value of an audience.  As a preacher, I know the profound difference between reading my sermon aloud in preparation for a service and actually preaching it in a setting such as this one.  Even though you do not say a word as you listen, your listening makes all the difference.  It means that my words matter.  They are not merely reverberating off the walls.  Your listening gives shape and form to what I say and it holds the promise of an impact.  While I prefer compliments to criticism, it is your listening that I crave.  And even though you are silent I sense your participation in this moment.  You are silent, but you are not absent.

This, I think, is what R.S. Thomas came to understand and he came to understand it in the silence he experienced on this day at this moment.  He came to sense that God was most present in the depths of the deepest silence imaginable.  I suspect some people, perhaps many, are not comfortable with a God who listens, but says little or nothing.  I, for one, find it refreshing, moving, and greatly appealing.  There are times when words are not appropriate and there are times when words are not possible.  It can be moments of great joy or tremendous sorrow.  It can even be true of moments so ordinary that their enormous value often escapes us.  What these moments require is not narration, but attention; listening, not description.

Today God listens to the Son’s beautiful music that makes music still.  Today God is silent.  God will not speak tomorrow either.  But on the third day the God who listens will act.  From today’s silence something new and extraordinary will emerge.  For people of faith, the Listening God is enough.  The immediate divine word giving way to a constant verbal barrage does not seem authentic.  I like when God is silent because often the silence is what needs to be said.  Resurrection will happen.  New life will come.  Sowing with tears will give way to reaping with songs of joy.  Holding to this is what faith is all about.  Being comfortable in the absence of words in the space of the suffering moment is the surest sign that one’s faith is grounded in that which is solid, in that which is God. 

Will you give me the gift of sitting with me for a few moments in silence, allowing God to listen closely to the music the Son has played?

 

Suffering

 

I walk into the hospital room not knowing what to expect.  She is in pain… incredible pain… excruciating pain.  Her husband stands by her side doing all he can, but nothing helps.  She is doubled over in pain.  Page the nurse.  It takes 10 minutes for the nurse to come to the room.  The nurse leaves to call the doctor.  More pain… agonizing pain.  Another ten minutes passes before the nurse returns.  She reports that no new pain medicine can be administered for another 20 minutes.  Can’t they see that she is in pain?  Don’t they care?  Surly in this day and age there is a pill or a shot or an IV drip that can make this all go away.  But there isn’t, at least that can be authorized immediately based on a limited diagnosis.  Her pain just gets worse.  Her husband grows more anxious, more tense, more frustrated, more angry, more powerless.  I pray.

The noted writer Evelyn Underhill says that pain plunges like a sword through all creation.  It may be physical, it may be emotional, it may be spiritual, or it may even be intellectual.  No matter how it manifests itself, pain becomes suffering and, in this world, suffering is everywhere and it is unavoidable.   It plunges like a sword through all creation.  Each of us here this morning is either suffering personally or is deeply concerned about the suffering of another.  David Rensberger says that suffering drinks up what you have, and then asks for more.  It is one of life’s constants.

More than any other human experience, suffering has the capacity to slay the illusion that we control the course of events in our lives.  Suffering challenges our idol of self-sufficiency, inviting us to recognize that we are not now – and never were – calling the shots.  It forces us to confess that we are not always in control and to admit that we are in fact vulnerable. 

Suffering offends not only our pretension to control what happens, but even more, our capacity to comprehend.  That life should be reasonable – more, that we should be able to grasp its rationality – is a demand deeply entrenched within our humanity.  Yet with suffering we brush up against a life-process that we did not create, would not choose, and cannot comprehend.  In that hospital room that night there was just no way to manage what was happening and no way make sense of it.

As we hear again the story of Jesus’ Passion we realize how even Jesus had little control over the events of his life and we run up against our limited ability to comprehend why such an atrocity takes place.  And his suffering is made more difficult for us to face because of the strong tradition in the Christian faith that holds he went through this ordeal on our account.  We are the ones who shout “Crucify him.”  It is for our sins that he died.  It is a tradition that inspires guilt and shame, which at times can be appropriate.  

Remorse is the right response to those things we have done that we ought not to have done and to those things we have not done that we ought to have done.  But when we understand this to be the only purpose to Jesus’ suffering, it then says something very damaging to us in our suffering.  It suggests that we are getting what we deserve.   Understanding our experience of suffering only in this way scars us spiritually and emotionally. 

Another tradition of our faith holds that suffering contains some hidden divine spark; an idea we sometimes advance when we say, “Well, God must have a reason for this” or “God must be trying to teach me something.”  This perspective, taken to an extreme, has encouraged some actually to seek out suffering, but there is absolutely nothing in the gospels to suggest that Jesus ever deliberately sought such experiences.  Indeed, he seems to do everything possible to alleviate them: healing the sick, forgiving troubled souls, reconciling the outcast, and comforting the sorrowful.

From today’s reading of the Passion we see nothing to suggest that Jesus deserved what he got, nor do we see that he had anything to learn from it.  What we see is the impetuous for a third tradition within our faith.  Jesus does not stand passively accepting abuse, rather he is noble and without fear, facing his enemy with courage and compassion.  Jesus does this because he is rooted in a goodness deeper than the suffering.  This third tradition in our faith holds that Jesus gives us a model for how to endure the suffering we experience. 

Based on his experience in pastoral ministry, Robert Morris, an Episcopal priest in New Jersey, has observed two primary ways people endure suffering.  There are those who are thankful and there are those who are victims.  The thankful people see life as a series of challenges to be faced.  For them, suffering is something to be dealt with, lived through, learned from, and redeemed.  The victims see life as a tale of repeated, undeserved woe.  They think of themselves as beset and besieged in a world of endless tests and trials.  They meet every ordeal in life with resistance, resentment, and downright outrage.

Morris describes in detail one particular discussion he had with a woman in the parish.  She had lost a son and then shortly thereafter fell and had to have a hip replaced.  The surgery gave way to chronic pain.  Her husband, who was used to being served, made no attempt to care for her, let alone amend the demands he placed on her.  For years the woman had been upbeat and positive, but all of this was just too much.  She now complained constantly.   

Meeting with her priest, she tearfully confessed that she felt terrible about the darkness she now brought to life.  The suffering she endued from pain and loss and disappointment was just too much for her to bear.  Morris found himself reminding the woman of Jesus’ teaching to love our enemies and to bless those who curse us.  “Pain,” he said, “is now a deadly enemy of your soul, not just your body.  Every time it comes, why don’t you bless it instead of curse it?” 

This was quite a rigorous demand to place on the woman and Morris would have understood if she had thrown him out because of it.  But she gasped, sat up straight, dried her eyes, thought for a minute, and then said, matter-of-factly, “Very well then; that’s what I’ll do.”  And so she did.  She arose, cared for her husband, and the pains slowly receded.  More importantly, her spirits turned toward accepting her life as it was, with blessing rather than cursing.  In the midst of suffering, she had ceased to be its victim.  Her heart had opened again to a larger world.

How we face suffering determines whether pain, sorrow, difficulty, deprivation, or challenge become part of our soul’s shrinking or it’s stretching.  Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ suffered so that we might know how to suffer.  He showed us that there is a way to stay rooted in God’s kingdom when the ways of this worldly kingdom do everything possible to bring you down.

So in the hospital room I prayed; first, quietly on my own, and then aloud for the three of us.  The simple act of prayer reminded us that God’s goodness was with us, even in such a terrible moment.  No sooner than I said ‘amen’ the nurse appeared with new medication.  A few minutes later the pain subsided to a manageable level. 

I don’t know what it would be like to worship a god who did not know, who could not know, what it is like to suffer.  Why would you even pray to such a being?  How could such a god understand our need?  Today we remember again that Jesus suffered pain.  He suffered not as one without hope.  He suffered, but what He suffered only served to open His heart even wider to us in our need.  It only served to pioneer a way for us to follow when the blade of the sword that plunges through all creation touches our life.

Dry Bones & Burial Bindings

 

In the 1960’s, the Presbyterian Church where I grew up was typical of many mainline Christian churches of that era.  Within its congregational membership were two groups – each with a distinctive approach to living out the Christian faith.  I suspect that at first neither group knew these differences existed.  Certainly they did not perceive the ramifications that would become evident in a few short years.  It took the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and Watergate to bring them to the surface of community life.

Let me describe each approach to you and while I will make broad, sweeping generalizations that don’t hold true in every specific instance, hopefully the big picture will be quite accurate and may even illuminate what those of you at St. Paul’s in that era experienced, or what you may have experienced in whatever church you attended at the time.

One distinctive approach to the Christian life was championed by a group that came to be known as ‘evangelicals’.  These folks experienced Christianity as a personal relationship with Jesus initiated by a conversation experience inaugurating a personal commitment to Christ.  For these folks, Christianity was primarily concerned with the individual’s relationship to God.  Jesus’ primary mission was to help individuals be reconciled with the Father.  My youth minister began his spiritual journey years earlier with a conversion experience at a Billy Graham rally.  Evangelicals like him wanted to help people like me to understand the personal consequences of my sins and to convict me of my need to be saved.  Salvation brought with it the gift of new life through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.  This newfound power enabled converts to lead better and more holy lives that were pleasing to God.

The other approach to the Christian faith and life was championed by a group of people who came to be dubbed ‘social activists’ or ‘liberals’.  These folks were more focused on how the faith got played out at a communal level; often passionately focused on national and world events.  For them, God was concerned primarily with society’s injustices and oppressive structures.  Followers of Christ, from their perspective, were called to make this world a better place; a place more in keeping with Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom of God.  A leading figure in this movement was Dr. Martin Luther King.  To the degree that God is concerned about the individual, it is that you and I be good people and good citizens who lead basically good moral lives and convert our faith into social action.  Civil Rights, protesting war and nuclear proliferation, and advocating for social policies designed to address the concerns of the most needy in our society became passionate, Christian concerns for this group.

In my experience at the church where I grew up, fissures began to appear between these two approaches in the late 60’s.  A struggle for the congregation’s identity emerged in the mid 70’s.  By the early 80’s, the evangelicals in the church left to become part of a newly formed non-denominational church in town; one that saw its population swell into the thousands as like-minded Christians from other congregations and other denominations felt the need to gather with their own and apart from the civil activists with whom they had done battle in a local church.  For their part, the liberals were more than happy with this parting of the ways because it ratcheted down the level of theological conflict in the congregation.

I recount this history for two reasons.  First, so that you might think how the same issues and dynamics played out either here at St. Paul’s or in the congregations you have attended, and second, because our two principle readings this morning split in their focus in very similar ways.

The gospel reading details Jesus’ discussion with two sisters and his concern for their brother – his friend – who has died.  In the end, Jesus calls Lazarus back from the dead and instructs that he be unbound of his burial cloths.  It is, in many ways, a quintessential evangelical story.  Jesus’ focus and attention is directed to specific individuals who respond to him in faith and receive tangible blessings for their actions.

The other reading focuses on one of seven visions recorded by the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel.  Along with approximately 3,000 other Jewish exiles, he lived in Babylon after the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in 586 BC.  We can scarcely imagine today the struggle it was to keep alive the Jewish culture and faith.  As I mentioned in my sermon on Wednesday, countless other societies were forced into exile and never heard from again. 

In this particular vision, God shows Ezekiel a valley of dry bones, which are then called back to life in dramatic fashion.  This is not the assurance of personal resurrection Jesus demonstrates by raising Lazarus.  This resurrection is communal and it affirms God’s deep concern for the restoration of a way of life embodied by a people of faith.  It is a dramatic demonstration of God’s concern for society as a whole.

The pairing of these two readings reminds all Christians of our need for each other and how imperative it is we work for a way to integrate our distinctive approaches the Christian faith.  As individuals, our lives do need to be changed.  We need to be committed to the Christian faith and empowered to live out the vows and promises we make through Baptism and Confirmation.  Each of us needs to know that God seeks our deepest healing and calls us to a life of stewardship where we devote our time, our talent, and our treasure to God’s work in the world.  But our vision is something far bigger than just ‘winning souls’, it is nothing short of a world where all people live in right relationship with God, with each other, and with this fragile earth our island home.  Our vision is to usher in a Kingdom where God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven. 

We began our Lenten journey with an Old Testament reading represented by apples and figs leaves recalling a time when all creation lived in harmony with God’s dream.  We end our Sunday’s in Lent with a vision of dry bones where that dream is restored.  That restoration will come through Jesus’ death on a cross; a death that will have implications both personal and communal.

When I think back to the church where I grew up I realize that some opposites in life that do not conform to a simple categories of right and wrong where one is helpful and the other destructive.  There are some tensions that are polarities that must be managed so as not to go too far toward one extreme or the other.  Each polarity offers something that is beneficial but the exclusion of the other would be disastrous.  A classic polarity involves breathing.  Imagine if, as a society or as a congregation, we divided between inhalers and exhalers.  This is a tension where you do not want a winner and a loser.  In order to thrive – even to live – we have to embrace the insights and benefits both of breathing in and breathing out.

A focus on the individual verses a focus on the community is another fundamental polarity.  Any business, organization, movement, society, or religion that emphasizes one at the exclusion (or diminishment) of the other is doomed.  Our readings this morning call on us to integrate something our society as a whole has struggled to blend and the Christian church has toiled with it as well.  We are a people who, following the stories of our sacred texts, seek to redeem each and every person while at the same time working to make this world a better place for everyone.  We are a people guided by bones and burial bindings – the restoration of dry bones littering a valley and calling forth a specific person from the dead – both in desperate need of new life.